Prevalence of substance use and abuse among black university students and the factors influencing them: implications for substance abuse prevention

Abstract:

Substance use and abuse is widespread throughout the world, including South Africa. Substance abuse constitutes an individual, a family and a social problem. Because of the dearth of information concerning the extent of the abuse as well as conditions associated with it, particularly among Black youth in South Africa, the present study sought to fill this gap. The present study investigated the prevalence of substance use and abuse among Black university students. Firstly, it examined the extent to which the university students abused various substances such as alcohol, tobacco, spirits, sleeping medicine, hallucinogens, barbiturates, whiffers, mandrax, dagga, amphetamines and heroin. Secondly, it investigated the variables that are associated with use and abuse of these substances. The research design used was a questionnaire-based survey. The questionnaire consisted of both open-ended and closed questions, thus it yielded both quantitative and qualitative data. The first part of the survey was essentially descriptive while the second part was analytical. The measuring instrument that was used was a self-report inventory adopted from an existing questionnaire as adopted by Bodisch (1994), Kota (1994) and Stubbs (1994) which was itself based on another questionnaire originally developed by Du Toit (1974). A convenient sample consisting of 520 undergraduates Psychology students at the University of Fort Hare was used as participants. The survey data was analyzed in three ways. Firstly, prevalence rates were determined through the use of descriptive statistics, namely, frequencies of occurrence in terms of percentages. Secondly, associations between the level of use substances and various personal and social variables were determined through the use chi-square tests. Thirdly, and finally, predictions of the level of use of substances were determined through the use of multiple regression analyses. The overall results show that alcohol was the most widely used substance, followed by sleeping medicine, spirits and tobacco in that order. However, only tobacco, alcohol and dagga were abused by significant proportions of the sample. All in all, the prevalence rates of use and abuse of these substances were fairly moderate, ranging from around 30% down to about 5% of the sample. The variables that were associated with the levels of use of these substances were, inter alia, age, gender, year of study, progress at university, church attendance, occupational status and income of parents or guardian, family instability, family history of use and abuse of drugs, love of television and movies, amount of confidence, stress and depression and the ignorance of the effects of drugs. The multiple regression analyses was used to test how well the variables studied actually predicted the levels of use of substances by participants. Among the variables found to predict level of use of substance most accurately were, occupational status and income of parents or guardians, cousin's use of substances, attitudes towards legalization, lack of family support and use of dagga. The implications of these findings for the development of the appropriate intervention programmes to alleviate substance use and abuse among this segment of the population are discussed.